A Storm’s a Comin’!

Some (OK, most) of you know I am a HUGE weather buff. When I was in high school, I even job-shadowed the local weather guy(The Wonderful Weather of Woz. Seriously.) and wrote my “what I wanna do when I grow up” papers on becoming a meteorologist.

I applied and was accepted to University of Oklahoma (side note: does anyone else sing the song from the musical to spell the state?? Anybody??), one of the best schools in the nation for storm chasing and meteorology.

Then I found out that it would include lots of math and physics.

Yeah, I am not good at that stuff.

So, I decided to do Communications instead, hoping to become a weather bunny (ie: someone who reports the weather for the news, but not AMS-American Meteorological Society - certified).

I fight global poverty for a living. Not the same but still interesting work none the less.

I still take on the role of “weather announcer” at work, sending out watches and warnings to the staff and giving updates throughout the day.

Snow storm coming? Check your email- I sent you an update! Hailstorm headed our way? I will let you know and send you the latest radar images!

While I am fascinated by weather, I have a love/hate relationship with severe storms. They scare me to death, and I get a stomachache each time they are approaching (not to mention the horrible migraines I get from the barometric changes).

But for some reason, when I move to new places, I am initiated by bad weather.

Most of my spring and summer storm seasons as a child were spent in the bathtub with my (not wanting to cooperate) cat reading covered with a blanket.

I did that until I read somewhere that the bathtub is on of the worst places to be during a storm (you could be electrocuted if your house is hit by lightning) so I changed my venue to the internal hall closet.

Yes, I was am kinda a freak.

One Mother’s Day when I was 7 or 8, I spent the course of 8 hours driving Interstate 80 home to Rock Island, IL from Montezuma, Iowa with my mom and her cousins hitting a new tornado warning every county we travelled through. The storms were following us.

I spent the whole hot car ride under a scratchy blanket scared to death. We even had to stop at the University of Iowa music building to ride out one particular bad cell.

When we got home, I drug my mattress out to the living room and hit under it while watching the radar and warnings on television.

But I digress.

When I first went to college (in Cedar Rapids), the first night I moved in we had a tornado warning. I spent my first night living away from home in the basement scared to death, getting to know my other freaked out neighbors.

Since today is a furlough day, I spent the day inside the house (other than a run to RiteAid and Wal-mart for supplies) then about 30 minutes ago I checked CNN.com and noticed one of the stories was about “live coverage of severe weather in Atlanta” so I quickly went to my favorite weather website NOAA (www.weather.gov).

There are tornado and thunderstorm warnings all around my house right now.

I stepped outside onto my balcony and snapped a few pictures of the fast moving clouds …

My pictures don’t do the cloud movement justice—the low clouds are moving one direction, and the top ones are moving another. The temperature is about 72 degrees – a perfect recipe severe weather.

Here is my welcome to Atlanta, I guess!